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1. Re Trump rationalizers: If you're intelligent person, you can't quite make yourself defend Trump's behavior, statements and governance.
2. So you avert your gaze from Trump. You attack Clinton, the media, liberals of all sorts. You obsess about various side issues so as to..
3. ...avoid confronting the fact of the Trump presidency and its implications for American politics. It's a familiar psychological pattern:
4. Those who do, at some level, know better are more infuriated at those who won't go along than are the simple-minded true believers.
5. It's the collaborators who can't abide the resisters; it's the fellow travelers who most want to shut down dissenters.
6. And so when we ask in our editorial -- weeklystandard.com/editorial-the-… -- whether conservatives and Republicans are willing to have it said...
7. "that they stood on the sidelines and watched as the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan was destroyed," we may not have...
8. ...got it quite right. Because while some are standing quietly on the sidelines, many feel they have to take a side.
9. And while they're too intelligent to do much cheering for Trump, the way they can show they are, really and truly, on his side...
10. ...is by criticizing the critics. Decrying dissent is psychologically and intellectually easier than defending the indefensible.
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